Striking the Balance w-4

by Harry Turtledove

  “This marching, I am given to understand, promotes group solidarity among the Tosevites,” the male from Intelligence answered. “I do not understand exactly why this is so, but that it is so appears undeniable: every native military uses similar disciplinary techniques. One theory currently popular as to the reason why is that the Big Uglies, being a species less inherently disciplined than the Race, employ these procedures to inculcate order and conformity to commands.”

  Teerts thought about that. It made more sense than a lot of theories he’d heard from Intelligence. That didn’t necessarily mean it was true-nothing necessarily meant anything on Tosev 3, as far as he could tell-but he didn’t have to keep from laughing in Aaatos’ face.

  He went back to watching the marching Tosevites. After a while, they stopped marching and stood in a neat grid, still stiffly erect, as the male with stripes on his sleeves harangued them. Every so often, they would break in with chorused responses. “Do you understand their language?” Teerts asked Aaatos. “What are they saying?”

  “Their leader is describing the attributes of the fighting males he wants them to become,” Aaatos said. “He is asking them whether they desire to possess and do possess these attributes. They answer in the affirmative.”

  “Yes, I can see that they might,” Teerts said. “We have never had cause to doubt the fighting attributes of the Tosevites. But still I persist in wondering: will these attributes be employed for us or against us in the end?”

  “I do not think the danger is so great as you fear,” Aaatos said, “and, in any case, we must take the chance or risk losing the war.” Teerts had never heard it put so bluntly. He started worrying in earnest.

  VI

  One of the nice things about Lamar, Colorado, was that when you’d gone a mile past the outskirts of town, the place might as well not have existed. There was nothing but you, the prairie, a million stars shining down on you from a sky clearer and blacker than the sky had any business being-and the person who’d walked a mile past the outskirts of town with you.

  Penny Summers snuggled against Rance Auerbach and said, “I wish I’d joined the cavalry, the way Rachel did. Then I’d be riding out with you tomorrow instead of staying stuck back here.”

  He slipped his arm around her waist. “I’m glad you’re not,” he answered. “If I were giving you orders, it wouldn’t be fair for me to do something like this.” He bent down and kissed her. The kiss went on for a long time.

  “You wouldn’t need to give me orders to get me to want to do that,” she said breathlessly when their lips separated at last. “I like it.” Then she kissed him.

  “Hoo!” he said after a while-a noisy exhalation that sent breath smoking from his lungs. Spring was coming, but the nights didn’t know it yet. That it was cold gave him another excuse to hold her tight against him.

  After one more kiss, Penny threw back her head and stared up at the night sky through half-closed eyelids. She couldn’t have sent him a fancier invitation if she’d had one engraved. The sweet curve of her neck was pale as milk in the starlight. He started to bend to kiss it, then checked himself.

  She noticed that. Her eyes opened all the way again. “What’s the matter?” she asked, her voice no longer throaty but a little cross.

  “It’s chilly out here,” he said, which was true, but only part of an answer.

  Now she exhaled-indignantly. “Wouldn’t bethat chilly,” she said, “specially while we were doin’-you know.”

  He wanted her. They both had on long, heavy coats, but he knew she knew: she wouldn’t have needed to be the heroine in the story of the princess and the pea to tell. But, even though she wasn’t under his command, hauling her denims down and screwing her in the dirt wasn’t what he had in mind, no matter how much he’d been thinking about it when he’d asked her to go walking with him.

  He tried to put that into words, so it would make sense to him as well as to her: “Doesn’t seem quite fair somehow, not when you were so poorly for so long. I want to make sure you’re all right before I-”Before I what? If all he’d wanted to do was lay her, that would have been simple. Crazy how being interested in her as herself made him-not less interested in her as a naked girl, but not so interested in that just for its own sake.

  She didn’t get it. “I’m fine,” she said indignantly. “Yeah, it hit me hard when my pa got killed, but I’m over that now. I’m as good as I’m ever going to be.”

  “Okay,” he said. He didn’t want to argue with her. But when people went from down in the dumps to up in the clouds too darn quick, that didn’t mean they got off the roller coaster and stayed up there. From what he’d seen, the ride kept right on going.

  “Well, then,” she said, as if it were all settled.

  “Look, here’s what we’ll do,” he told her. “Wait till I come back from this next mission. That’ll be plenty of time to do whatever we want to do.”And you’ll have had more of a chance to sort yourself out, make sure you’re not just throwing yourself at the first guy who’s handy.

  She pouted. “But you’re going away for a long time. Rachel says this next mission isn’t just a little raid. She says you’re going out to try and wreck one of the Lizards’ spaceships.”

  “She shouldn’t have told you that,” Auerbach answered. Security came natural to him; he’d been a soldier all his adult life. He knew Penny wouldn’t run off and blab to the Lizards, but who else had Rachel told about the planned strike? And who had they told? The idea of humans collaborating with the Lizards had been slow to catch on in the United States, at least in the parts that were still free, but such things did happen. Rachel and Penny both knew about them. Yet Rachel had talked anyway. That wasn’t so good.

  “Maybe she shouldn’t have, but she did, so I know about it,” Penny said with a toss of the head that seemed to add,So there. “What if I go and find somebody else while you’re gone, Mr. Rance Auerbach, sir? What about then?”

  He wanted to laugh. Here he was trying to be careful and sensible, and where was it getting him? Into hot water. He said, “If you do that, you wouldn’t want to tell him about a time like this, would you?”

  She glared at him. “You think you’ve got all the answers, don’t you?”

  “Shut up,” he said. He didn’t aim to stop a fight, or to make one worse; he spoke the words in a tone of voice entirely different from the one he’d been using.

  Penny started to reply sharply, but then she too heard the distant roar in the sky. It grew louder with hideous speed. “Those are Lizard planes, ain’t they?” she said, as if hoping he’d contradict her.

  He wished he could. “They sure are,” he said. “More than I’ve heard in a while, too. Usually they fly higher when they’re on their way to a target, then go down low to hit it. Don’t know why they’re acting different this time, unless-”

  Before he could finish the sentence, antiaircraft guns east of Lamar, and then in the town itself, started pounding away. Tracers and shell bursts lit up the night sky, dimming the multitude of stars. Even well outside of Lamar, the din was overwhelming. Shrapnel started pattering down like hot, jagged hail. If that stuff came down on your head, you could end up with a fractured skull. Auerbach wished he were wearing a tin hat. When you took a pretty girl out for a walk, though, you didn’t worry about such things.

  He never saw the Lizard warplanes till after they’d bombed and rocketed Lamar, and then only the flames shooting out of their tailpipes. After their run, they stood on their tails and climbed like skyrockets. He counted nine of them, in three flights of three.

  “I’ve got to get back,” he said, and started toward Lamar at a trot. Penny came right with him, her shoes at first thumping on dirt and then clunking along the blacktop like his.

  The Lizard planes returned to Lamar before the two of them got there. They gave the town another pounding, then streaked off toward the east. The antiaircraft guns kept firing long after they were gone. That was a universal constant of air raids, from everyt
hing Auerbach had seen and heard. Another constant was that, even when the guns were blazing away at real live targets, they hardly ever hit them.

  Penny was panting and gasping before she and Auerbach got to the outskirts of Lamar, but she gamely stayed with him. He said, “Go on over to the infirmary, why don’t you? They’re sure to need extra hands there.”

  “Okay,” she answered, and hurried off. He nodded to her back. Even if she remembered later on that she was supposed to be mad at him, it was better to see her up and doing things than tucked away in her miserable little room with nothing but a Bible for company.

  No sooner had she disappeared round a corner than he forgot all about her. He made his way toward the barracks through chaos in the streets. Bucket brigades poured water on the fires the air attack had started. Some of those fires would burn for a long time, and were liable to spread; Lamar depended on wells for its water these days, and well water and buckets weren’t going to be enough to douse the flames.

  Wounded men and women cried and screamed. So did wounded horses-at least one bomb had hit the stables. Some of the horses had got out. They were running through the streets, shying from the fires, lashing out in panic with their hooves, and making life more difficult for the people who were trying to help them and help put Lamar back together.

  “Captain Auerbach, sir!” somebody bawled, right in Rance’s ear. He jumped and whirled around. His second-in-command, Lieutenant Bill Magruder, stood at his elbow. The firelight showed Magruder’s face covered with so much soot, he might have been in blackface. He said, “Glad to see you’re in one piece, sir.”

  “I’m okay,” Auerbach said, nodding. Absurdly, he felt guilty for not having been on the receiving end of the punishment the Lizards had dished out. “What’s the situation here?” That was as discreet a way as he could find of saying he didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell was going on.

  “Sir, not to put too fine a point on it, we’ve taken a hell of a licking: men, horses-” He waved at a horse that ran past, its mane smoldering. “The ammo we’ve been stockpiling got hit goddamn hard, too. Those bastards never pounded on Lamar like this before.” He stuck his hands on his hips, as if to say the Lizards had no business pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

  Auerbach understood that. Because the aliens didn’t do new things very often, you could get the idea they never did anything new at all. If you did, though, it might be the last mistake you ever made.

  Losing the ammunition hurt. “We can forget about tomorrow’s mission, sounds like,” Auerbach said.

  “I’m afraid so, Captain.” Magruder grimaced. “Be a while before we can think about it again, too.” His soft Virginia accent made him sound all the more mournful. “Don’t know what’s going on with production, but getting the stuff from one place to another isn’t easy any more.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Auerbach said. He slammed a fist into the side of his thigh. “Damn it. If we could have blown up one of their spaceships, we really would have given them something to think about.”

  “I know it, too,” Magruder answered. “Somebody’s got to do it-I agree with you there. Just doesn’t look like it’s going to be us.” He quoted a military maxim: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

  “And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Auerbach said. “The enemy, that dirty dog, he goes and has plans of his own.” He laughed, even if it hurt. “You just can’t trust the son of a bitch that way.”

  “Sure can’t.” Magruder looked around at the wreckage that had been Lamar. “Other thing is, his plan tonight, it worked out fine.”

  Lamar was a mess, no two ways about it. “Isn’t that the truth?” Auerbach said again.

  Thezeks who’d been up at thegulag near Petrozavodsk for a while described the weather as nine months of winter and three of bad skiing. And they were Russians, used to winters far worse than David Nussboym was.

  He wondered if the sun ever came out. If the snow ever stopped falling.

  Nights were bad. Even with a fire in the stove in the center of the barracks, it stayed bitterly cold. Nussboym was a new fish, a political prisoner as opposed to an ordinary thief, and a Jew to boot. That earned him a top-level bunk far away from the stove and right next to the poorly chinked wall, so that a frigid draft constantly played on his back or his chest. It also earned him the duty of getting up and feeding the stove coal dust in the middle of the night-and earned him a beating if he stayed asleep and let everyone else get as cold as he usually was.

  “Shut your mouth, you damnedzhid, or you’ll be denied the right to correspondence,” one of theblatnye- the thieves-warned him when he groaned after a kick in the ribs.

  “As if I have anyone to write to,” he said later to Ivan Fyodorov, who’d made the trip to the same camp and who, being without connections among theblatnye himself, also had an unenviable bunk site.

  Naive as the Russian was, though, he understood camp lingo far better than Nussboym did. “You are a dumbzhid,” he said, without the malice with which theblatnoy had loaded the word. “If you’re deprived of the right to correspond, that means you’re too dead to write to anybody anyhow.”

  “Oh,” Nussboym said in a hollow voice. He hugged his ribs and thought about reporting to sick call. Brief consideration was plenty to make him discard that idea. If you tried to report sick and the powers that be weren’t convinced, you got a new beating to go with the one you’d just had. If they were convinced, the borscht andshchi in the infirmary were even thinner and more watery than the horrible slop they fed ordinaryzeks. Maybe the theory was that sick men couldn’t digest anything with actual nourishment in it. Whatever the theory. If you weren’t badly sick when you went into the infirmary, odds were you would be by the time you got out-if you got out alive.

  He huddled in his clothes under the threadbare blanket and did his best to ignore both the pain in his ribs and the lice that swarmed over him. Everybody had lice. There was no point in getting upset about it-except that it disgusted him. He’d never thought of himself as particularly fastidious, but his standards, he was learning, differed from those of thegulag.

  Eventually, he drifted down into a light, uneasy sleep. The horn that announced morning roll call made him jerk as if he’d grabbed hold of an electrflied fence-not that the camp near Petrozavodsk boasted any such luxury, barbed wire being reckoned plenty to contain the likes of him.

  Coughing and grunting and grumbling under their breaths, thezeks lined up so the guards could count them and make sure no one had vanished into thin air. It was still black as pitch outside, and cold as the devil’s wife, as the Russians said: Petrozavodsk, the capital of the Karelian Soviet Socialist Republic, lay well north of Leningrad. Some of the guards couldn’t count their fingers and get the same answer twice running, too. All that made roll call even longer and more miserable than it might have been otherwise. The guards didn’t much care. They had warm clothes, warm barracks, and plenty to eat. Why should they worry?

  When it left the camp kitchen, theshchi Nussboym gulped down might have been hot. By the time it got ladled from the pot into his tin cup, it was tepid going on cold. In another fifteen minutes, it would be cabbage-flavored ice. He got a lump of hard, coarse black bread to go with it-the regulation ration: not enough. He ate some and stuck the rest in the knee pocket of his padded pants for later.

  “Now I’m ready to go out and chop wood,” he declared in a ringing voice that would have sounded false even if he’d just feasted on all the beefsteak and eggs he could hold. Some of thezeks, those who understood his Polish, laughed. Itwas funny. It would have been even funnier if what he’d just eaten hadn’t been starvation rations even for a man who didn’t have to do hard physical labor.

  “Work detail!” the guards bawled. They sounded as if they hated the prisoners they’d have to watch. Likely they did. Even if they didn’t have to work, they did have to go out into the cold forest instead of back to the barracks.

  Along
with the rest of the men in his gang, Nussboym shuffled over to get an axe: a big, clumsy one with a heavy handle and a dull blade. The Russians would have got more labor from thezeks had they given them better tools, but they didn’t seem to care about such things. If you had to work a little longer, you had to work a little longer. And if you lay down in the snow and died, another prisoner would take your place come morning.

  As thezeks slogged out toward the forest, Nussboym thought of a riddle he’d heard one German guard in Lodz tell another, and translated it into a Soviet equivalent: “An airplane carrying Stalin, Molotov, and Beria crashes. No one lives. Who is saved?”

  Ivan Fyodorov’s brow furrowed. “If no one lives, how can anybody be saved?”

  “It’s a joke, fool,” one of the otherzeks hissed. He turned to Nussboym. “All right, Jew, I’ll bite. Who?”

  “The Russian people,” Nussboym answered.

  Fyodorov still didn’t get it. The other zek’s pinched, narrow face stretched to accommodate a grin. “Not bad,” he said, as if that were a major concession. “You want to watch your mouth, though. Tell that one where too many politicals can hear it and one of ’em’ll rat on you to the guards.”

  Nussboym rolled his eyes. “I’m already here. What else can they do to me?”

  “Ha!” The otherzek snorted laughter. “I like that.” After a moment’s thought, he stuck out his gloved hand. “Anton Mikhailov.” Like most prisoners in the camp, he didn’t bother with patronymics.

  “David Aronovich Nussboym,” Nussboym answered, trying to stay polite. He’d been able to make himself prominent in the Lodz ghetto. Maybe he could manage the same magic here.

  “Come on!” shouted Stepan Rudzutak, the gang boss. “We don’t make our quota, we starve even worse than usual.”